"him with the income and recognition that he needed. However, a full edition of Shakespeare would require a publisher to make a large commitment of time and money, so Johnson decided to begin by focusing on a single play, ""Macbeth"". Johnson began work on ""Macbeth"" to provide a sample of what he thought could be achieved in a new edition of Shakespeare. He got much of his information while working on the ""Harleian Catalogue"", a catalogue of the collection of works and pamphlets owned by Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer. He published this work, along with"
"The Comedy of Errors The Comedy of Errors is one of William Shakespeare's early plays. It is his shortest and one of his most farcical comedies, with a major part of the humour coming from slapstick and mistaken identity, in addition to puns and word play. ""The Comedy of Errors"" is, along with ""The Tempest"", one of only two Shakespearean plays to observe the Aristotelian principle of unity of time—that is, that the events of a play should occur over 24 hours. It has been adapted for opera, stage, screen and musical theatre numerous times worldwide. In the centuries following"
"apparent ontological paradox by inspiring Shakespeare to borrow phrases that the Doctor quotes from his plays. Examples of this include the Doctor telling Shakespeare that ""all the world's a stage"" (from ""As You Like It"") and ""the play's the thing"" (from ""Hamlet""), as well as the name Sycorax from ""The Tempest"". However, when Shakespeare himself coins the phrase ""To be, or not to be"", the Doctor suggests he write it down, but Shakespeare considers it ""too pretentious"". In a different version of the joke, the Doctor exclaims ""Once more unto the breach"", and Shakespeare initially likes the phrase, before realising"
"word ""football"" was used disapprovingly by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare's play ""King Lear"" contains the line: ""Nor tripped neither, you base football player"" (Act I, Scene 4). Shakespeare also mentions the game in ""A Comedy of Errors"" (Act II, Scene 1): ""Spurn"" literally means ""to kick away"", thus implying that the game involved kicking a ball between players. King James I of England's ""Book of Sports"" (1618) however, instructs Christians to play at football every Sunday afternoon after worship. The book's aim appears to be an attempt to offset the strictness of the Puritans regarding the keeping of the Sabbath. The"
"phrase is the best known part of the speech, it and the later sea voyage and pirate attack are central to critical arguments regarding the play. The phrase, and its containing speech, exist in only one of three early printed versions of the play—the second quarto edition, and scholars are divided on whether this is indicative of authorial intent, or a mere artefact of playhouse practicalities. The phrase occurs in ""Hamlet"" Act 3, Scene 4, as a part of one of Hamlet's speeches in the Closet Scene. Hamlet has been acting mad to throw off suspicion that he is aware"
"words, Shakespeare ""invented the formula that the sexual becomes the erotic when crossed by the shadow of death"". Of Shakespeare's works, ""Romeo and Juliet"" has generated the most—and the most varied—adaptations, including prose and verse narratives, drama, opera, orchestral and choral music, ballet, film, television, and painting. The word ""Romeo"" has even become synonymous with ""male lover"" in English. ""Romeo and Juliet"" was parodied in Shakespeare's own lifetime: Henry Porter's ""Two Angry Women of Abingdon"" (1598) and Thomas Dekker's ""Blurt, Master Constable"" (1607) both contain balcony scenes in which a virginal heroine engages in bawdy wordplay. The play directly influenced"
"a favourite technique of the poet/dramatists of the time was irony, the double meaning or ""double entendre""—i.e. playing with words. For example, orthodox scholars often cite the poems in the First Folio as evidence for Shakespeare, such as Jonson's introductory poem describing the engraved portrait as having ""hit his face"" well, his eulogy that calls Shakespeare ""sweet Swan of Avon"", and Digges's line that refers to when ""Time dissolves thy Stratford monument"". Yet Marlovians say those can each be interpreted in quite different ways. The ""face"", according to the ""Oxford English Dictionary"" (10.a) could mean an ""outward show; assumed or"
"The Nelson Touch While on shore leave in England, during the summer of 1805; Nelson told his friend, Lord Sidmouth, about his ideas for his next sea battle. This collection of ideas he dubbed The Nelson Touch. After Nelson's death, the phrase took on a broader meaning relating to his leadership style. Nelson used the expression 'the Nelson touch' on more than one occasion, and its origin has been the subject of debate amongst historians. A favourite suggestion is that it derives from a line in Nelson's favourite play, Henry V (Shakespeare): 'a little touch of Harry in the night'"
"in theatres across the world to this day. They include tragedies, such as ""Hamlet"" (1603), ""Othello"" (1604), and ""King Lear"" (1605); comedies, such as ""A Midsummer Night's Dream"" (1594—96) and ""Twelfth Night"" (1602); and history plays, such as ""Henry IV, part 1—2"". The Elizabethan age is sometimes nicknamed ""the age of Shakespeare"" for the amount of influence he held over the era. Other important Elizabethan and 17th-century playwrights include Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and John Webster. The English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London. The linguist and lexicographer John Florio"
"Hill and was not a robbery, but rather an attempted shooting. Mainstream writers also say that this episode derives from an earlier anonymous play, ""The Famous Victories of Henry V"", which was Shakespeare's source. Some Oxfordians argue that ""The Famous Victories"" was written by Oxford, based on the exaggerated role it gave to the 11th Earl of Oxford. In 1609, a volume of 154 linked poems was published under the title ""SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS"". Oxfordians believe the title (""Shake-Speares Sonnets"") suggests a finality indicating that it was a completed body of work with no further sonnets expected, and consider the differences"
"Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, in ""Julius Caesar,"" ""the various strands of politics, character, inwardness, contemporary events, even Shakespeare's own reflections on the act of writing, began to infuse each other"". In the early 17th century, Shakespeare wrote the so-called ""problem plays"" ""Measure for Measure"", ""Troilus and Cressida"", and ""All's Well That Ends Well"" and a number of his best known tragedies. Many critics believe that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies represent the peak of his art. The titular hero of one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, ""Hamlet"", has probably been discussed more than any other Shakespearean character, especially for his famous soliloquy which"
"as ""The Witches; or, Harlequin Cherokee"" (1762), ""The Rites of Hecate; or, Harlequin from the Moon"" (1763) and ""The Hermit; or, Harlequin at Rhodes"" (1766), in addition to ""Cricket"". His earliest work was ""Pamela"" (1742). He is famous within sporting circles for his ""Cricket: An Heroic Poem"" (1744), whose line ""The strokes re-echo o'er the spacious ground"" has been quoted in the ""Oxford English Dictionary"". Its subtitle reads thus: ""Illustrated with the Critical Observations of Scriblerus Maximus. To which is Added an Epilogue, call'd 'Bucks Have at Ye All'. Spoken by Mr. King, at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, in"
"Shakespearean problem play In Shakespeare studies, the problem plays are three plays that William Shakespeare wrote between the late 1590s and the first years of the seventeenth century: ""All's Well That Ends Well"", ""Measure for Measure"" and ""Troilus and Cressida"". Shakespeare's problem-plays are characterised by their complex and ambiguous tone, which shifts violently between dark, psychological drama and more straightforward comic material; compare tragicomedy. The term was coined by critic F. S. Boas in ""Shakespeare and his Predecessors"" (1896), derived from a type of drama that was popular at the time of Boas' writing. It was most associated with the"
"Shakespeare may even have seen them himself. Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote in one of his plays published in ""The Gull's Horn-book"" (1609): It has been suggested that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the playing company that Shakespeare worked for as an actor and playwright for most of his career, named their playing space the Globe Theatre, built in 1599, as a response to the growing enthusiasm for terrestrial and celestial globes stimulated by those of Molyneux. In ""Twelfth Night"" (1600–1601), Shakespeare alluded to the Wright–Molyneux Map when Maria says of Malvolio: ""He does smile his face into more lynes, than"
"shake for twenty-nine miles around, and the foul air he blew out created more than fifty-three thousand tiny men, dwarves and creatures of weird shapes, and then he emitted a fat wet fart that turned into just as many tiny stooping women."" The plays of William Shakespeare include several humorous references to flatulence, including the following from ""Othello"": Benjamin Franklin, in his open letter ""To the Royal Academy of Farting"", satirically proposes that converting farts into a more agreeable form through science should be a milestone goal of the Royal Academy. In Mark Twain's ""1601"", properly named ""[ Date: 1601.]"
"of the protagonists, and ending with their tragic deaths. The conceit of dramatising Shakespeare writing Romeo and Juliet has been used several times. The oddball 1944 B-movie ""Time Flies"" features the comedy duo Susie and Bill Barton, who, time travelling, encounter a Shakespeare struggling for words for his balcony scene, which Susie (Evelyn Dall) supplies from memory, while Bill interrupts with quips. John Madden's 1998 ""Shakespeare in Love"" depicts Shakespeare's process in composing ""Romeo and Juliet"" against the backdrop of his own doomed love affair. Writers Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard exploited another commonplace of Shakespeare-related films, which scholar Tony"
"1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford. Some of Shakespeare's plays were published in quarto editions, beginning in 1594, and by 1598, his name had become a selling point and began to appear on the title pages. Shakespeare continued to act in his own and other plays after his success as a playwright. The 1616 edition of Ben Jonson's ""Works"" names him on the cast lists for ""Every Man in His Humour"" (1598) and ""Sejanus His Fall"" (1603). The absence of his name from the 1605 cast list for Jonson's ""Volpone"" is taken by some scholars"
"Words, Words, Words Words, Words, Words is a one-act play written by David Ives for his collection of six one-act plays, ""All in the Timing"". The play is about Kafka, Milton, and Swift, three intelligent chimpanzees who are put in a cage together under the experimenting eye of a never seen Dr. Rosenbaum, a scientist testing the hypothesis that three apes hitting keys at random on typewriters for an infinite amount of time will almost surely produce Shakespeare's play ""Hamlet"" (a variation on the infinite monkey theorem). The show's title is a phrase quoted from ""Hamlet"". The performance comprises the"
"thunderbolt. The ghosts fall on their knees."" The actors in Shakespeare's company included the famous Richard Burbage, William Kempe, Henry Condell and John Heminges. Burbage played the leading role in the first performances of many of Shakespeare's plays, including ""Richard III"", ""Hamlet"", ""Othello"", and ""King Lear"". The popular comic actor Will Kempe played the servant Peter in ""Romeo and Juliet"" and Dogberry in ""Much Ado About Nothing"", among other characters. He was replaced around 1600 by Robert Armin, who played roles such as Touchstone in ""As You Like It"" and the fool in ""King Lear"". In 1613, Sir Henry Wotton"
"he does have syphilis. He writes up his sonnets for publication. A Waste of Shame A Waste of Shame (aka A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets) is a 90-minute television drama on the circumstances surrounding William Shakespeare's composition of his sonnets. It takes its title from the first line of Sonnet 129. It was first broadcast on BBC Four on 22 November 2005 as part of the supporting programming for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season, but only loosely connected to the rest of the series. Its screenplay was written by William Boyd and the film was"
"Salad days """"Salad days"""" is a Shakespearean idiomatic expression meaning a youthful time, accompanied by the inexperience, enthusiasm, idealism, innocence, or indiscretion that one associates with a young person. A more modern use, especially in the United States, refers to a heyday, a period when somebody was at the peak of their abilities—not necessarily in that person's youth. The quote ""salad days"" is from the Shakespearian play 'Antony and Cleopatra' and is spoken in Act 1, Scene 5 by Cleopatra. The phrase was coined in Shakespeare's ""Antony and Cleopatra"" in 1606. In the speech at the end of Act One"
"One could wring, methinks, a flood from a damp clout!"" Eventually, Welch says, he enrolled Shakespeare in a night school class on Shakespeare's plays—taught, as it happens, by Robertson. At this point, Robertson begins to become genuinely worried. He recalls a bald man with an unusual accent, and starts to doubt whether Welch's story was all alcoholic fantasy. Timidly, he asks Welch what happened, and the physicist explodes with anger. Shakespeare had been humiliated, he says, and Welch had to send him back to 1600: ""You poor simpleton, you ""flunked him!"""" Asimov comments that he wrote the story to get"
"urgency or disorder. In contrast, the following lines from: ""Romeo and Juliet"" (""c."" 1595) are completely end-stopped: Each line is formally correspondent with a unit of thought—in this case, a clause of a sentence. End-stopping is more frequent in early Shakespeare: as his style developed, the proportion of enjambment in his plays increased. Scholars such as Goswin König and A. C. Bradley have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment. ""Endymion"" by John Keats, lines 2–4: Closely related to enjambment is the technique of ""broken rhyme"" or ""split rhyme"" which involves the splitting"
"for the audience's approval. The play is based on a tale (3.9) of Boccaccio's ""The Decameron"". Shakespeare may have read an English translation of the tale in William Painter's ""Palace of Pleasure"". The name of the play expresses the proverb ""All's well that ends well"", which means that problems do not matter so long as the outcome is good. There is no evidence that ""All's Well"" was popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime and it has remained one of his lesser-known plays ever since, in part due to its unorthodox mixture of fairy tale logic, gender role reversals and cynical realism."
"and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy in his lifetime. However, in 1623, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that included all but two of his plays. The volume was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Jonson presciently hails Shakespeare in a now-famous quote as ""not of an age, but for all time"". Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, Shakespeare's works have"
"Sleepwalking scene The sleepwalking scene is a critically celebrated scene from William Shakespeare's tragedy ""Macbeth"" (1606). The first scene in the tragedy's 5th act, the sleepwalking scene is written principally in prose, and follows the guilt-wracked, sleepwalking Lady Macbeth as she recollects horrific images and impressions from her past. The scene is Lady Macbeth's last on-stage appearance, though her death is reported later in the act. Well known phrases from the scene include ""Out, damned spot!"" and ""All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."" The British tragedienne Sarah Siddons (1755 - 1831) was distinguished for her"
"to ""Elementary, my dear fellow! Elementary!"" (in the final 1935 text; Act II Scene II). The 1976 Samuel French reprint has the phrase ""Oh, this is elementary, my dear Watson"" (Act I Scene III; though the scene has been placed in a different act, it is the same scene as above), but it is unclear which of the earlier versions is the basis of this reprint. It was also Gillette who introduced the famous curved pipe as a trademark Holmes prop. Sherlock Holmes (play) Sherlock Holmes is a four-act play by William Gillette and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, based on"
"William Shakespeare William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the ""Bard of Avon"". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire."
"at the hands of Macduff. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ""Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow"" is the beginning of the second sentence of one of the more famous soliloquies in William Shakespeare's tragedy ""Macbeth"". It takes place in the beginning of the 5th scene of Act 5, during the time when the Scottish troops, led by Malcolm and Macduff, are approaching Macbeth's castle to besiege it. Macbeth, the play's protagonist, is confident that he can withstand any siege from Malcolm's forces. He hears the cry of a woman and reflects that there was a time when his hair would have"
"after an absurdly pretentious dialogue between the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes and his friend Sir Nathaniel. The two pedants converse in a mixture of Latin and florid English. When Moth, a witty young servant, enters, Costard says of the pedants: Flap-dragon was a game which involved trying to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy. The word has been used by adherents of the Baconian theory who believe Shakespeare's plays were written in steganographic cypher by Francis Bacon. In 1905 Isaac Hull Platt argued that it was an anagram for ""hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi"", Latin for"
"intended five parts. Other famous examples include Amir Khusro: ""Khamsa-e-Nizami"" (13th century), a pentalogy of classical romances, and Ali-Shir Nava'i: ""Khamsa"" (16th century). The fivefold structure is usually first encountered by an English-speaking reader in the plays of William Shakespeare, which, like nearly all English, French and German plays of the period, are divided into five acts, even when the narrative of the play hardly seems to demand it; in his ""Essay on Comedy"" (1877), George Meredith wrote sardonically that ""Five is dignity with a trailing robe; whereas one, or two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading."""
"because of the tone of Jonson's references to him but because Shakespeare's company produced a number of Jonson's plays, at least two of which (""Every Man in His Humour"" and ""Sejanus His Fall"") Shakespeare certainly acted in. However, it is now impossible to tell how much personal communication they had, and tales of their friendship cannot be substantiated. Jonson's most influential and revealing commentary on Shakespeare is the second of the two poems that he contributed to the prefatory verse that opens Shakespeare's First Folio. This poem, , did a good deal to create the traditional view of Shakespeare as"
"A Waste of Shame A Waste of Shame (aka A Waste of Shame: The Mystery of Shakespeare and His Sonnets) is a 90-minute television drama on the circumstances surrounding William Shakespeare's composition of his sonnets. It takes its title from the first line of Sonnet 129. It was first broadcast on BBC Four on 22 November 2005 as part of the supporting programming for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told season, but only loosely connected to the rest of the series. Its screenplay was written by William Boyd and the film was directed by John McKay. Lines from the sonnets are presented as"